What Could Cause a Phone to Ring Once Every Night?

My phone rings every night, just one ring. The call does not register on caller id. Verizon has checked it out, as well as, my security system company. I have no fax machine, so what can be causing this to happen? This has been going on for the past 3 months.

http://ask.meta steriously-ringsMy guess is that your handset is at fault and is experiencing an interference issue. Have you had the very same handset during this 3-month period? Ask Verizon if they will loan you another phone for a week to see if the ring continues or not.

Change the channel if it's cordless, if this does not help change phones. Years ago I had the same problem, the phone company told me that they needed to readjust something on their lines and it never happened again. I think it was connected to my answering machine. Do you have one? Good luck:)

Got enemies? Funny to think of but if you did, they could set it up to call you in the middle of the night. Some call it a "ping ring" like a sonar on a ship will send one ping to signal a ship but not a response.

You can often contact the phone company and they won't charge you for a number change. Or, if your phones have a ringer "on/off" then use that, and just turn it back on in the am. Good luck. There is nothing worse than being awaken by a phone.

This is going to sound really off-the-wall, but: do you live in a gated community ( with a guard house, with entry keypad at the gate--one in which there's a system with which you can "ring in" a visitor from your phone?).

We lived in one a few years back and our phone began doing the one-ring thing at precisely 5:30 pm every weekday. It turned out -- after a couple of weeks of this-- that a new resident must have been mis-entering our access code rather than his own ( off by one digit) and then immediately entering the right number in order to get in.

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A gate guard with some smarts --who happened to be in the management office the day I went there hoping to possibly find answers--remembered a resident who held up the line at the keypad every day at that time, and thought there was too much of a time coincidence to be a coincidence.

They ended up changing our access code to a totally different number and the one-ringers stopped.

May just have been a strange, isolated glitch for us, but you never know :)